Noa & Snow
by Alix Eynaudi
Noa & Snow (a team, a time spent together, a choreographic spell, a prefatory charm), a sensation that nothing that comes out of our mouths, fingers, keyboards, mother’s tongues, languages, is ours. (Mis)quoting Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney: We are tricked into thinking that reactive interiority is about the shape of the person not about the shape of the world but I think we’re visitors, who are always visiting, and who are always being visited – we are always speaking names, always being spoken by them, always working in this unnaming and renaming, maybe both in but also against the grain of how poetry bears naming as a kind of power. What the words mean is none of our business, but it is indubitably our business where the words travel. Borrowing books, dances, words, languages. Unfixing, dys-locating, dys-owning locations, we – the borrowers – inside of a Noa & Snow timeframe, slid swords into words into libraries, (deeply) hanged out together, spent time across partially and obliquely shared readings. We jumped off board, surfed sofas, texts, annotations and their arrangements as many vehicles, conveyors of senses – as in senses leaving the littorals, our literal translations, leaving the ship [(a pause for the word ship. The break it asks to think of a ship.]
Owing to one another all the time (prior to and beyond the logic of financial credit and debt), borrowing words-thoughts as we are dances, re-flexing our muscle tones, our tongues, our mother’s tongues. (Mis)quoting Mirene Arsanios: This language is not mine, I bit my tonque, it is not mine. It’s a mother’s, language says: how I love the mutual indebtedness that is not about paying one another back, but about enjoying that dependance, listening to the ghosts (our Protextions we called them) in the paddings, quilts, of our shadowy studies.
The book is published on the occasion of the final event of Noa & Snow, a gentle experiment between the everyday and the event, at the Volkskundemuseum, Vienna.
